roots of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. Contributors to Roel Meijer’s edited collection, Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (London: Hurst, 2009), explore commonalities and differences among various strands of Salafism and examine tensions between local and global goals. Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), argues that the majority of jihadis strive to transform or overthrow local regimes in the Muslim world and that only a small minority target the West. He also examines the reasons that global jihadism emerged in the late 1990s and analyzes the split in the jihadist movement that ensued. The United Nations Development Programme, Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment (New York: UNDP, 2017), considers economic marginalization, low levels of education, absence of good governance, and security sector abuse as factors driving extremism, with religious knowledge often serving as a deterrent.
Two French scholars, Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy, have engaged in a heated public debate about the origins of the violent extremism associated with contemporary jihadist movements. Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), provides an overview of Islamist movements in the twentieth century, focusing especially on Iran, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, and Afghanistan. Kepel argues that in the late 1990s, Islamist movements split into a majority faction that favored Muslim democracy and a small minority that engaged in terrorist attacks to promote their goals. Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), tracks the origins of global jihad to the Soviet-Afghan War and argues that al-Qaeda’s ideology emerged both from Islam’s strict Salafist and Wahhabi traditions, which advocate abstention from worldly affairs, and from the more political Muslim Brotherhood, whose goal is to establish an Islamic state. Gilles Kepel, with Antoine Jardin, Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), examines Muslim youth who were radicalized in the West and targeted Western populations. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), disputes the significance of conservative Islamic traditions and instead explains violent jihad as a response to social, political, and economic changes, one that is politically rather than religiously inspired. Roy argues that Islam has not been radicalized, but rather that radicalism has been Islamized. Alienated youth who had not previously been religious turned to a distorted variant of Islam for meaning, identity, and respect, just as earlier generations had embraced other radical ideologies; the result is the nihilistic rejection of a society that has rejected them. In the West, these youths have been radicalized not by established religious scholars and mosques, but in prisons—where they often serve time for petty crime—and by self-proclaimed authorities on the internet. Roy’s widely quoted challenge to Kepel’s thesis appears in Olivier Roy, “Le djihadisme est une révolte générationnelle et nihiliste,” Le Monde, November 24, 2015.
3
Identifying the Actors
Who Intervened and Why
POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND social instability in Africa after the Cold War resulted in new waves of foreign intervention. Global, regional, and subregional state-based organizations were central to war-making and peace-building processes, and nonstate actors associated with international terrorist networks played key roles in some conflicts. During the periods of decolonization and the Cold War, foreign states intervened in African affairs unilaterally or in collaboration with other states. Former imperial powers and new Cold War powers were the most significant sources of external intervention. After the Cold War, unilateral engagement continued. Onetime imperial and Cold War powers continued to intercede in their historical spheres of interest; Middle Eastern states and organizations took a special interest in North Africa; and African countries intervened in their neighbors’ affairs. However, multilateral intervention by organized groups of states (intergovernmental organizations) and transnational networks of nonstate actors grew increasingly important.
This chapter introduces the major foreign actors involved in African conflicts after the Cold War, including nation-states on other continents, neighboring African countries, multilateral state-based organizations, and nonstate actors associated with international terrorist networks. It distinguishes the outside contestants in decolonization and Cold War conflicts from those involved in their aftermath, and it establishes a framework for understanding the interests and motivations of the foreign actors featured in the regional case studies.
During the post–Cold War period, Western nations continued to implicate themselves in African affairs. France and the United Kingdom intervened in their former colonies, while the United States focused on its former Cold War allies and on countries deemed strategic in the war on terror. In some instances, Western powers and their allies interceded under the auspices of intergovernmental organizations such as the UN, NATO, or the EU.1 In other cases, they took unilateral action. Middle powers like the Nordic states also played significant roles in multilateral peace negotiations and peacekeeping operations, and they often engaged in independent diplomatic initiatives.2
The other former Cold War powers, China and Russia, ordinarily opposed political and military intervention in the internal affairs of other nations—their immediate neighbors excepted. As permanent members of the UN Security Council, they frequently challenged Western-sponsored initiatives focusing on human rights and governance issues. Like other industrial states, China was particularly interested in regions that were rich in strategic natural resources. In exchange for guaranteed access to such resources, China invested heavily in African industries and infrastructure and turned a blind eye to human rights abuses, political repression, and corruption. However, China, like the West, recognized that its economic interests would be best served by peace and stability. In consequence, Beijing expanded its involvement in multilateral disaster relief, antipiracy, and counterterrorism operations. In 2016, it contributed more military personnel to UN peacekeeping operations than any other permanent member of the Security Council. It engaged in mediation and peacekeeping efforts in Sudan and South Sudan, where it had significant investments in oil production and infrastructure, and also in Mali, where its primary interests lay in the oil and uranium of neighboring countries. China also joined France, the United States, Italy, and Japan in establishing a military facility in Djibouti, which overlooks one of the world’s most lucrative shipping lanes.
Russia, like China, viewed post–Cold War Africa as a new frontier of political and economic opportunity. Itself the target of Western economic sanctions, Moscow had no interest in critiquing its partners’ domestic human rights abuses or international transgressions. It offered goods and services to countries sidelined by Western restrictions and used its power on the Security Council to oppose robust military interventions that would encroach on national sovereignty and promote Western interests. Critical of Western influence over peacekeeping structures and initiatives, Moscow also recognized that its participation provided it with an avenue toward increased global prominence. Although its personnel contributions to African peacekeeping missions have been relatively small, Russia has trained African peacekeepers for both UN and AU missions, and it has sought leadership roles in the UN peacekeeping headquarters in New York and in missions on the ground. In Africa, Moscow’s military imprint is more evident in its substantive weapons trade: a major military supplier to African governments during the Cold War, Moscow has continued to expand its arms trade on the continent. It has also used its military connections to extend its influence in other arenas. Although Russia’s commerce with Africa is still small relative to that of China, Europe, and the United States, it has increased dramatically since 2000. Like China, Russia has focused its investments on the energy and mining sectors and on infrastructure development.
Middle Eastern powers also intervened in Africa after the Cold War. Historically, Middle Eastern countries maintained strong political and cultural ties with North Africa, which was commonly considered part of the Arab World. During the post–Cold War period, a number of Middle Eastern nations intervened in North Africa and the Horn
